


mourn the marching grave

by mickleborger



Series: no sun in the shadow [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Bar fights, Depression, Gen, POV First Person, Soul-Searching In The Woods, yeah no one walked away with their time with the Inquisitor Just Like That, yes i know we've done the multiclass backstory before but judet needs to be SAD about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 03:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18357284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: watcher judet and a lot of decisions watcher judet does not want to confront emotionallythe punchline is multiclass





	1. as days turned

**Author's Note:**

> (Dead To A Dying World, "The Hunt Eternal")

The silence that follows after the machine shuts down is the heaviest to ever fall, and I am on the ground, thinking of an oath I did not make.  Behind, there is a bustling; the squawk of one of the more belligerent wounded being tended to.  It all sounds so far away.

Someone sits across from me and sets a tin of ointment at my knee, soot-covered fingers lingering close enough to mine I can tell how dramatic my powder burns are.  I am not asking if I made the right choice, which means I do not have to hear that no one else knows, either.  I am not lying down on the ground, no matter how much I want to, because _lying on the ground_ is where the mangled empty corpse is, bloodied, the ghost of a burning crown still upon his brow.

Someone has helped me put balm on my wrists and someone had taken my hands and asked me if I can stand; someone is pulling my arms gently up and asking me if I can walk, _please, we have to leave, we have to camp but we can't camp here._

I am not answering that _of course we can camp here_ because my eyes meet the eyes through which Thaos ix Arkannon saw this world for the last time and my stomach turns and mercifully, mercifully, someone hands me the pistol I'd dropped and could not find.  The eyes stare onward but my pistol is heavy and warm and as we shuffle and stagger past the disaster zone they do not follow; and by the time we have climbed all the way up the ramp I don't even feel them anymore.  The chattering in my head has gone quiet and I feel the lost sleep of months sprinting up to me to fill the void and my head is as heavy as my gun and I am going back to the ground and someone is helping me down and I think I am saying _don't let me sleep too long, don't let me sleep to long_ and the answer is a quiet _of course not, of course not_ and a blanket round my shoulders; _of course not,_  and for the first time in an age my sleep is black and deep and silent.

\---

A sneeze much larger than the orlan that produced it ensures that I do not, in fact, sleep too long; though now that I'm no longer stunned and faintly feverish I wish that I'd gotten a fair bit more.  Hiravias has failed to wake himself or Kana up, and Aloth looks like he hasn't slept at all.  Edér and Pallegina are eyeing the collapsed tunnel in a way that makes me glad _I_ am not a collapsed tunnel, Edér finishing a murmured sentence that sounds as if it contains words like _spell_ and _Hiravias_.  The baggy-eyed look of guilt on Aloth's face confirms that he has indeed not slept -- though I'm pretty sure none of his spells include ‘clear rubble’.  As I try to sit up the look tries to rearrange itself from _guilty_ to _helpful_ but the muscles of his face are about as cooperative as all of me and the only success in the endeavor is him passing me a waterskin.

“We need a plan for getting out of here,” comes a voice from above; and I _know_ I'm still fucked up because I can't tell if it's Edér or Pallegina speaking.

 _Gods_ , I almost say, before I remember.  I never had use for them in the Lands but the word is all sorts of bitter now.  I swallow it with some water and stand.

The silence that used to be the whir of a machine and the clang of steel and crash of gunpowder against chanting and yelling is less ponderous now, as if it's fluid enough to slip between the cracks of empty spaces that lead to Elm’s Reach to scatter itself in the Dyrwood, and I don't know what to do with _that_ thought.  I focus on the rubble.  I do not focus on the pile of empty shells covered in ash down in the center of the chamber.  I do not think of how much _we need a plan for getting out of here_ sounds like _seventeen_ drily mumbled around a pipe, and feels like the last flash of feeling in my eyes in the mirro-- the Inquisitor's eyes.  Not mine.

 _Gods,_ and I don't care how the word tastes, do I need more sleep.  Hiravias's eyepatch leers up at us from Hiravias's face, half-hidden in his curls.

\---

We end up clearing most of the rubble by hand, for all Hiravias is willing to blast it to oblivion.  Something something, _wouldn't want to bring the whole place down on our heads,_  something something -- I'm sure it makes sense from the perspective of someone better put together than I am.  It's harder work than any if us really has the heart for but the prospect of taking another rest so close to the big machine and the dead things around it is, ah, _encouraging,_  as Kana puts it.

(and Teir Evron feels the same sort of pompous as before but there's something else there now, some sort of note in the silence around the altars that is not what it was before-- and Aloth is quick to shuffle after Pallegina storming out-- and Kana hasn't the heart to admire the books one last time-- and Edér with his bloody phalanges staring just a bit too long at the shrine of Eothas whose silence is loudest of all for the scream he is not launching at it--)

And it isn't until we are well across the water and the sight of the sisters that Hiravias turns to me with his grin full of fang and a thoughtful tap to his eyepatch and says in a low laughing voice:

“Well!  Didn't expect _that_.”

\---

We sleep one last night above the bones the gods have buried ( _above the ghosts,_ I do not amend, because the ghosts are up here with us).  Sagani makes a mention of splitting off from us once we hit the crossroads, and the passing jingle of chimes suggests she won't be the only one.  Kana is chattering excitedly to Aloth about the puzzle he unearthed in my miserable nightmare basement while writing on entirely too many sheets of paper at once.

Everyone else is quiet, hazy.  Hiravias is eyeing me through the smoke of his pipe, unless it's Edér's, unless I'm imagining it -- and _if_ I'm not imagining it, he has something to say.  I don't think either of us knows what it is yet.  I feel myself falling asleep in the wicker chair underneath the blanket I haven't really abandoned since Sun-In-Shadow.

The morning air is damp and bites with the first baby teeth of winter.  Maneha and Pallegina are up already, intent on informing me that they, also, will be breaking off before we return to the keep (or, rather, Pallegina is; Maneha is gazing thoughtfully out the window and thumbing a corner of her sack).  I'm starting to think we should all hike down to Defiance Bay for a night, but then I am also thinking about my bed.  My own bed.  With no one but me in it nor in my head.  I am thinking I do not want to say goodbye, but maybe only because I don't want to do much of anything.

I look past Maneha to the grimy autumn sky behind her and do not welcome the thought that we left a dead body back there, under the lake.


	2. and the world grew cold

The last night spent in the woods and the chunk of our group broken off to head to the port of Defiance Bay like an ice floe leaves a bad taste in my mouth distinct from the taste of the bones we buried for the gods.  I feel Kana's big warm hands around mine for miles through the forest, feel Maneha's backbreaking hug.  I feel an absence.  I do not think too hard about why I keep being surprised by the sight of my own face reflected in water and blades and the eyes of others.

We are all dwelling on something as we walk, through woods brisk and yellowing.  I am realizing I was not enough myself to enjoy them when they were thick and green.  The stern clamor of adra chimes warns me that I'm sulking and I glance sideways at someone I thought had left with the rest of the party, someone whose name is changing too fast for me to see.  She is not dwelling.  She is staring right at me and she is not speaking a word.

Up the road and slightly to the left, in the woods, I hear the bark of a stelgaer who is not dwelling on much of anything, either.  The silhouette of Caed Nua flickers in and out in the twilight across the plain.

\---

We came to Caed Nua looking for answers.  We return to Caed Nua with answers. There is no one to whom to give them.  The Devil of Caroc keeps on walking, under the barbican and through the grounds and past the western gate and over the bridge and into the trees, dissolving in the moonless night.  We are all still stopped under the arch, just in sight of the chapel nested in a half-curled adra fist.

Aloth will leave in the morning.  He isn’t saying, but he has rubbed the ash off his cuffs so doggedly he may wear a hole in them.  Maybe he doesn't realize yet.  He flinches when Zahua claps him on the back and sprints with a jubilant shout back down the path we came from, turning north with the last shadows of twilight.  He whispers me a good-night and a thank-you and turns his back to me for the last time in this lifetime.

Edér stays another few days, making jokes or excuses about thatching my roof as if the Steward doesn't take care of everything, before admitting that if he doesn't get moving soon he's afraid he'll start changing colors with the season.  We offer to walk with him to wherever he's going, over protests that it's not necessary, and that he can take care of himself, and he doesn't know where he's going anyway.  He leaves with a pack of food and the glittering of chimes -- and that sweet little cat that took an exceptional liking to him in a moldy dungeon a hundred years ago.

\---

The morning skies have taken on the hue of watery blood and the fields are frosting over.  I have taken to wandering the grounds, in the parts beyond the fort I would call overgrown if not for my field studies in the rural parts of the Lands.  They are so thin in comparison, testimony to the last fifteen years this palatinate has suffered.  They look the way I feel.

Hiravias, spear propped on his shoulder, finds me digging aimlessly into a patch of dirt I didn't like the look of.  I'm putting the dirt into a glass vial and I am going to run tests on it, but it's just for the sake of applying fire and chemicals to something; any environmental survey I wanted to do in these woods, I did long ago in the summer the Inquisitor borrowed from me.  Hiravias is showing all of his teeth too pointed to be entirely orlan and his eyepatch, I swear, is winking at me.  I am not going to ask him if I made the right choice, because he is going to shrug and laugh and say _who knows_?

(In five years, to the sound of gods helpless and furious and screaming, I will ask myself if I am still the same and I will say that _no; I have changed for the better_ \-- and realize that my spirit was sundered long before anyone knew.)

He looks down at me, on my knees, dirt black against fingers white, colors drained by the moonlight like souls drained by th-- gods _damnit_.  He looks at me and smiles his big sharp smile and asks me if I have a minute to follow him upriver.


	3. swallow and thrive

What Hiravias actually said to me, during an ugly winter storm which we should really have spent in Caed Nua and not in a cave full of frozen mud from a late flood, was _take this, kid; you need it more than I ever did_ as he handed me a pendant I think he should have worn had he taken a slightly different path.  When the anemic stain moved from the sky to the boughs of the trees he fucked up my hair and bid me goodbye, then ran off to chase his own shadow into the purple horizon.   _I expect you know the way back_ , he’d laughed, and to my surprise I do.

It’s taken long, too long -- but I see smoke as if from chimneys now after weeks of walking.  I’ve weaved different flowers into different kinds of crowns and not left a single offering to a single overgrown shrine in the wilds.  He knows what He did.

I see smoke and it is definitely from chimneys and there is a ghost walking towards me that is not a ghost, that has found a new name for herself.  A young lady we met in Gilded Vale looked at her at the peak of an ordeal and whispered _Calisca?;_  and this is not her name but it is the first that rolls to me across the pale green ground of spring like the fog of something melting, and her expression is warm but unsmiling.  She knows I have changed, too.  The adra chitters in the breeze and I can’t tell if she’s speaking or if I’m thinking: _he needs you._

There are shouts muffled in the distance, as if through walls more than through distance, and I rush toward them.  I can’t hear the chimes behind me over the sound of a door slamming, but I know they’re there.  I catch someone much larger than me as he falls backwards out the door, unbloodied but dazed, and in the quick shuffle of thoughts between being caught and barely saying my name he clearly has to remind himself that he smells too much like whiteleaf to criticize how much I smell like I spent the cold season in the woods.  The roaring from the Dracogen is clearer now, and coming towards us.

 _I’ll explain when it’s over?_ he asks in the quiet glance he gives me as he rights himself, already shifting his weight forward, his hair like hay poorly cut falling over his eyes.

 _You’ll explain when we win,_  I hope my smirk says as I feel the storm I caught on the thirteenth day after midwinter build within me.

He looks like he wants to tell me it’s not about winning, in the way he squares his shoulders.  He looks like he mutters to himself, “Later. Talk later.”

I can’t tell if the lightning that strikes comes from Hylea or from something else.  My heart crackles.


End file.
